The Labrador was licking its foot where I'd trodden on it. I leaned down to stroke the dog but when I did, it growled and bared its teeth.
The D-G must have heard the dog growl. He said: 'C! Behave, C. Do you hear: behave.'
Was the dog really named C?
Bret, who was watching this exchange, looked at me without expression and said: 'There's one other aspect of this operation, Bernard. This man Fedosov has had direct involvement in the investigation of the death of Tessa Kosinski.' He let that sink in. 'The Director-General is most anxious that we should use his presence here to get to the bottom of that incident. He wants it cleared up once and for all.'
'Good,' I said.
'Werner will do all the contacting. No need for you to go over there, just in case it's some sort of trap. All you have to do is collect him from Werner and bring him here. Or perhaps you both should go. You and Werner can work out the details.'
Werner said: 'VERDI wants his father brought out too.'
I looked at Werner. It was a new development and I wished Werner hadn't sprung it as a total surprise.
Bret said: 'Any problem about that?'
'Is there some official line of contact with him that I'm not a party to?' I asked. VERDI was clearly in regular contact with someone who wasn't telling me what was happening.
Werner said to Bret: 'No. Bernard and I will work it out somehow.'
'It's a need-to-know situation, Bernard. Just for once, do it the way we want it,' said Bret. 'Just toss this goon in the trunk of your car and bring him back here, Bernard. Don't start opening cans of worms.'
We were right back to the beginning again. It was a full circle back to Kinkypoo offering me handcuffs and sticky-tape to bring back VERDI alive and kicking.
Fiona arrived back from her parents' house in the late afternoon. 'Werner is here,' I called. 'He's staying for dinner. How are the children?'
She came in looking radiant. 'It was such a gorgeous day, Bernard. Hello, Werner. You are looking well.' I gave her a kiss.
'You should have stayed longer,' I said.
'It was very tempting but I knew you'd be waiting for me. The children can be so funny. We laughed and laughed all day.'
'Where was your father?'
'He's been looking at horses. I think he'll be hunting again before the month is out. That bad fall shook him but I told him that if he doesn't get on a horse again soon, he may not ride again. What's that you're drinking? Beer? Uggh.'
'Shall I phone for an Indian take-away?'
'Oh, so that's why you are drinking beer. Yes, do. I'm starved. But would Werner like that?'
'If you order it,' said Werner. 'I don't understand the menus.'
'What are you drinking, darling?' I asked her.
'Nothing at all. I drank too much last night.'
'Sit down, darling. I'll order the curry.' But she preferred to order it herself. She had the names of the Indian dishes we liked best written in her notebook in the kitchen, and she hated some of the hot ones.
Our dinner arrived as a dozen mysterious tinfoil trays. Fiona stacked them into the fan oven for twenty minutes a just enough time to fill the entire apartment with the pervasive smells of hot curry a then tipped them separately into incongruous and expensive chinaware.
'Billy fell off his bicycle last week, and frightened Mummy half to death ... he came running in with blood on his shirt. But it was only a few scratches. Perhaps I will have a beer. But Sally has amazed everyone at school by winning all the swimming races. I think some of the elder girls were not pleased to be outdone by a little shrimp. She might even wind up school champion.'
'Good for Sally. I'll phone her.'
'She's so like you, Bernard,' said Fiona as we ate the meal. 'So single-minded and tough.'
'Is that what I'm like?'
'And I'm like Billy ... always stumbling and falling and getting hurt.'
'Really?' I looked at her with amazement. I'd always thought it was so obviously the other way round. Billy with his clumsy, ill-judged attempts to be a success was reliving my life, while cool calm and dedicated Sally effortlessly won all the prizes, and got all the praise, and was exactly like Fiona. But I didn't say that exactly; I said: 'But you are the tough one, Fi.'
'I wish it was true,' she said. 'When I was working in the East I was driven to inventing a fictitious personality for myself, a sort of Doppelganger. It was a male named Stefan Mittelberg -I got the name at random from a directory a and he helped.'
'Helped? Helped how?' I said.
'I was all alone, Bernard. I needed guidance and I got it from a person I invented, a hard-nosed self-assertive male. Whenever I felt overwhelmed, I pretended I was this Stefan character, and did whatever he would have done.'
'Sounds like a desperate last resort,' said Werner, half in jest.
She smiled. 'Sometimes I pretended I was Bernard. But sometimes I needed someone even harder than him.'
'Even harder than Bernie?' said Werner in pretended surprise.
'There were nice people too,' she said, as if remembering it all for the first time, for I'd never heard her talk like this before. 'My assistant, at the KGB/Stasi command unit on Karl Liebknechtstrasse, was an elderly man named Hubert Renn. A dedicated Marxist but a thoroughly decent man. I planned to arrange everything when the time came for me to escape so that Renn would be completely eliminated from any suspicion of complicity. But when the time came ... it ... I wasn't ready ...' She got up from the table and hurried into the kitchen.
Werner picked up one of the dishes, still half-filled with chicken curry, and was about to follow her into the kitchen and help her. I took his sleeve and shook my head. He sat down again and sipped some beer.
When Fiona returned she was icily composed and seemed completely recovered. She sat down and asked Werner how he liked living in Zurich, and how early the powder snow was deep enough on the slopes. And eventually Fiona went to bed and left us to drink beer and talk.
'I think old man Fedosov has probably been marked for years,' I said.
'By their people?'
'Yes. You know how they work, Werner. They don't vet their people and give them a clean bill of health, the way our Internal Security does it. I heard VERDI say there'd been a KGB report on the old man, dating back to my dad's time. A serious report about betraying the State, not a complaint from the neighbours about playing the radio too loud. You know what that means, Werner. They will check him and double-check him. They'll do it again and again and again, for ever. When a suspect comes out of their vetting process with a clean bill of health, they just figure the investigators didn't try hard enough.'
'Would that affect us?'
'It might, if we brought them out together. Or even if the old man tried to cross the Wall alone and some suspicious Grepo checked the records and found VERDI was already in the West.'
'You think they would stop the old man crossing?'
'Of course they would. But that's the least of our problems. They can throw the old bastard into solitary in the Lubyanka and let him rot for all I care. But if they arrest the old man they might blow the whistle on VERDI too soon, and that would screw up the whole operation.'
'And VERDI wouldn't like it,' said Werner.
'Yes,' I said irritably. 'And VERDI wouldn't like it.'
'So what do we do?'
'I've nothing very clever to suggest, but let's bring the old man through a different checkpoint at exactly the same time. And let's take the old man to France or Belgium or somewhere. And maybe make it all very conspicuous.'
Werner said: 'You don't think the old man might be reporting on his own son?'
'The old man is a devoted Stalinist, but has a crucifix on his wall. Forget the fact that he sold out to my dad during the airlift. It's the lifetime of indoctrination that wins out in these cases, you know that, Werner.'
'And make it conspicuous? How do I do that?'
'There's a kid I was with in the Magdeburg fiasco. Get him to hold hands with the old man, and bring him through.'
'He's a cantankerous old devil.'
'And the kid is straight out of the training school and looking for action,' I said. 'They'll be conspicuous all right. Just stay well clear of them.'
'Could I have that last little bit of chicken korma?'
I collected together the left-overs, went into the kitchen and stacked them in the microwave. Werner followed me and watched. 'I didn't know you liked curry so much,' I said.
'The Indian food in Berlin is Sri Lanka style a too hot for me,' said Werner. The oven squealed. He scraped the various curries, and the rice, on to his plate and we went back to the dining-room.
'The samosas go hard in the micro,' pronounced Werner, savouring a bite from a pastry. 'But the nan bread is just fine. Sure you don't want some?'
'A little curry goes a long way for me,' I said, declining it.
When Werner had consumed the final morsels of curry he sat back, filled and satisfied, and looked at me. I could see by the nervous way he moved his lips and fidgeted with his glass of beer that there was something serious still to come: 'You must take into account the tremendous post-traumatic shock she has had,' he said.
'I don't speak psycho-babble, Werner. You'd better tell me in plain English.'
'You heard what Fiona was saying. She was in East Berlin long enough to develop strong feelings of friendship and loyalty. That old German fellow is on her conscience. When she was wrenched away, at very short notice, there was probably the guilt of the betrayer to add to all the natural anxieties she had about the risks she was running. About being caught and facing trial as a spy.'
'Go on, Dr Volkmann. Have you been working on this thesis for a long time, or are you just making it up as you go along?'
'You're a pitiless bastard, Bernard. You're my best friend, and my oldest friend. But you are a hard-hearted pig.'
'I said, go on.'
'A sort of Doppelganger! My God, she must have suffered.'
'She's not the only one who went over there, Werner.'
'But Fiona had no experience of field work, Bernard. Can you imagine how she must have felt all the time she was working there? And then, in that terrible state of terror ... when she's being brought out to that damned Autobahn site, she has to watch you killing people she knows. Then she sees her sister shot dead, and even gets spattered with blood.' He looked at me as if expecting me to deny it; I made no response. 'You told me you wiped spots of blood off her face before driving through the checkpoint, just in case one of the guards noticed it. I mean ...' He stopped and caught his breath, agitated and distressed, as if it had all happened to him.
'Okay, Werner. Do you think I haven't thought about it? Not once; a thousand times. But what are you telling me to do?'
'I'm telling you to give her a chance. She needs help, Bernard.'
'She's getting better.'
'Maybe. Maybe not. But if you think a or she thinks a that she's ever going to recover from that experience you can think again. She'll come to terms with what happened, but she will never forget it or recover. I wish I could make you understand that. She won't get well. Stop waiting for something that will never happen.'
'Up to a point I suppose you are right, Werner,' I said. It was a depressing thing to hear, and desperately hateful to believe, and as soon as it was uttered I pushed it back into the recesses of my mind.
'At present, Bernard, her emotions are totally confused. She has to sort out her thoughts and memories and emotions. Some of them she will repress for ever. Maybe that's just as well. But what you must realize is that as she becomes adjusted, she will transfer her misery to some other person.'
'Why?'
'She needs a scapegoat. She'll blame someone. That's how she will recover her balance and adjust to normal life.'
'Me? Blame me?'
'The Department? George Kosinski? Dicky for taking Tessa to Berlin? I don't know. Such things don't follow logic. She just needs someone to blame. Don't make it so easy for her to choose you as that scapegoat.'
'You mean help her blame the Department?' I said.
'I suspect she's on the way to doing that already,' said Werner.
20.
Werner went back to Berlin and began making all the arrangements for VERDI to come to London. I worked hard and soon cleared up the greater part of the backlog of work that Dicky had dumped upon me. On Wednesday, taking Bret at his word, I went off to visit the children in the depths of Surrey's stockbroker belt.
It started off as one of those beautiful winter days when the sky is almost entirely blue, with just a few scratches of cloud, and the wind is no more than is needed to make the bare trees tremble. Wednesday was the children's half-day at school, so I picked them up at noon and took them out for lunch at a fish and chip shop in the village. But by the time we got there grey misty cloud was speeding across the sky.
'Grandad doesn't like fish and chips,' said Sally. We were enjoying the English working man's traditional meal: fried fish in batter, fried potatoes, pickled onions, bread and butter, and hot milky tea. As a child, and coming from Germany, I'd found it a curious meal. But it was what my father liked best to eat whenever he visited England, and I grew fond of it too, although the fearsomely acid pickled onion was something I still denied myself.
'Grandpa says fish and chips is common,' said Billy.
'But look at what they've done to this place in the last few months,' I said. 'They even have printed menus, and the new sign outside says "Fish Restaurant".' We'd often called in here for a take-away supper on the way back from visits to their grandparents. Not so long ago it had been called a 'fish and chip shop', with scrubbed wood counters and bench seats, linoleum on the floor, and the take-away orders came wrapped in newspaper.
'I liked it the old way,' said Billy. We always tried to get a table near the window so that we could keep an eye on the car, and on predatory traffic wardens.
'No,' said Sally. 'It's nicer now, with the red check tablecloths, and the waitress wearing a proper apron.'
'She's not a real waitress,' said Billy. 'She was always here. The man at the fryer calls her Mum.'
'You'll wind up a detective,' I said.
'I'm going to be a museum curator.'
This was an entirely new ambition. 'Why?' I asked him.
'You just look after things,' explained Billy, as if he'd penetrated a closely guarded secret of the museum trade, as well he might have. 'And no one would know they weren't yours. You could probably even take things home for a day or two.'